Vox Populi
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Tadeusz Dabrowski: Three Poems
Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Crayons
A boy and a girl in a train compartment. She
is absorbed by a coloring book, he by her, he’s watching and handing her crayons. Beside them sits a man
who betrayed his wife today. Throughout
the journey he sleeps. He’s sleeping off a hangover. At last
he gets up and leaves the compartment. By accident he spills the crayons.
~~
Jam Jars
In classical physics, the past is assumed to exist as a definite series of events, but according to quantum physics (…) only as a spectrum of possibilities.
—Stephen Hawking
Too often they kept on surfacing suddenly, stifling
like a blazing summer in childhood, scalding like the first stranger’s touch, enticing like all those whoreson numbers in an old address book, like music and singing audible at twilight from a distant part of town.
In they pressed through every single skin pore, so
I shut them up in separate jam jars and took them down to the cellar. Sometimes I remove a drop from each one,
mix them in a glass of water and look to see what would happen, if. But ever more often, in the total silence,
I can hear something roaring and hissing in the cellar. One day the jars will break, and the memories will merge into a single oily puddle, which I shall enter, as into fire.
~~
Ars Poetica
They ask me what is poetry,
or what does a poet feel while writing a poem.
My daughter is six months old and her mother’s
breast is the whole world to her, physics
and metaphysics. Sometimes we deceive
her with a pacifier, but lately she pulls it out
of her mouth and watches. She’s surprised
and focused then, like me as I look at the world
that I’ve managed
to take out of my mouth.
~~~~~
Copyright 2025 Tadeusz Dabrowski and Antonia Lloyd-Jones. From The Scent of Man by Tadeusz Dąbrowski translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Arrowsmith, 2025). Included in Vox Populi by permission of Arrowsmith Press.
Tadeusz Dąbrowski is a poet, essayist, critic, and editor-in-chief of the literary bimonthly Topos. His work has been translated into 30 languages. He is the author of nine volumes of poetry in his native Polish and a dozen in translation. Two of his collections, Black Square and POSTS, have been published in English by Zephyr Press. He lives in Gdańsk on the Baltic coast of Poland.
Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by many of Poland’s leading writers including Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by 2018 Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk.
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Love these. Thank you.
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Oh yes, these poems are great. In fact, the whole collection is great.
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Three fine poems.
“By accident he spills the crayons” –oh!
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Yes, the poems are so resonant even in English.
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But they are beautiful! Fresh, disconcerting, original…
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I agree, Marina. The poems are intuitively just so.
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Rose Mary Boehm writes eloquently in her comment below on some of the intricacies of translation. As translated I find these three poems startlingly moving, and bet they are so in Polish too.
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Coming from different languages, I have often thought how it would be impossible to actually WRITE most foreign-language poems in English. Or English poems in German, or Polish, or French, etc. In every poem there resides a different planet of musical, rhythmic, cosmic, cultural, religious, and nurturing experiences that bury themselves deeply into ones DNA and that’s where poetry is born. Translations get us close and the poems become almost otherworldly.
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I appreciate all the wonders and insights you bring to the Vox Populi conversation. You read the signs of the times so well. To quote from a poem of yours:
Keep watch.
The wolfdog is on the prowl.
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Thank you so much, especially for remembering lines from one of my poems.
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I love your poems and your translations, Rosemary. Thank you for sharing your gifts.
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What phenomenal poems! What a riveting voice that arrives like this startled change in the air, that makes me dig out a heavy jacket and scarf so I can sit out on our porch where I insistently remain reading & writing no matter what the season brings.
As Clara Schumann once wrote Brahms, perhaps so moved, I am “rubbery with sensation.”
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Spot on, Sean!
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i absolutely love these!
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Me too, Lola. These poems are from a new collection in a beautiful edition published by Arrowsmith, one of my favorite poetry presses.
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